It is saddening that the
latest celebrity to succumb to the fallacious Palestinian narrative
of the relationship between the Palestinian population and Israel is
Alice Walker, the distinguished Afro-American writer whose book The
Color Purple was a prize-winning contribution to American
literature. In a letter of June 9, 2012 to the Israeli
publisher Yediot Books she refused to allow the publication of a
Hebrew translation of her renowned book, dealing with racism in the
United States South, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in
1983.

Her letter is more based on fiction and misconceptions
than on fact. She argues that “Israel is guilty of apartheid and
persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in
the Occupied Territories.” This goes even further than most of
those who charge Israel with the appellation “apartheid,” since
they apply the term only to the “Occupied Territories.” In
addition, she writes that she supports the boycott, divestment, and
sanctions movement (BDS) because it will, she hopes, have an impact
on Israeli society to change the situation.

Walker, who has visited Gaza and has participated in
recent years in anti-Israeli activity, takes an unusually extreme
viewpoint in her pronouncement by saying that Israel’s policies
were worse than the segregation she suffered in her youth. She also
relates conversations with unnamed South Africans who told her that
those policies were worse than “apartheid.”

Like so many others, Walker does not appreciate that the
goal of many of the supporters of BDS is not to improve the lot of
the Palestinian population or to achieve peace between the contending
parties but rather to eliminate totally the state of Israel.

Factual evidence and reasoned argument seem to have
little impact on the critics and haters of Israel. Over and over
again objective analysis has shown that apartheid, defined
internationally as “inhumane acts committed for the purpose of
establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group …over
another racial group…and systematically oppressing them,” has no
application to and is not consonant with the policies and actions of
Israel.

Everyone will agree that inequities and problems exist
in the relationship between Israel and Palestinian Arabs. The
relationship exists in an imperfect society and imperfect people.
Israel is a democratic society and like the United States is
imperfect. Class and ethnic issues exist and are discussed freely in
the Israeli press and on the floor of the parliament, and are acted
upon, the only caveat being the need to protect the citizens of
Israel from attack.

Imperfections do not constitute a situation of
racism, discrimination, or segregation legally enforced. Reason is
unlikely to persuade those who are the slave of passions or
ideologically extreme, or those who are pathologically addicted to
dislike or hatred of Jews. One can understand the moral value
of empathy for those who are suffering. Walker, like so many other
persons of good intentions, has swallowed the Palestinian assertion
of victimhood, that they are an innocent people oppressed by a
powerful country, supported by an international conspiracy on its
behalf. If Palestinians are suffering this has been largely due to
Arab unwillingness to reach a peaceful solution with Israel.

We need an explanation from Alice Walker of her
passionate assault on Israel. Is she aware of the political and
religion freedom of Arabs, Muslims and Christians, in the areas
controlled by Israel? Arabs can build mosques and Christians
can build churches in Israel, a religious freedom denied to
Christians in many Muslim countries. Arabs are members of political
parties, are members of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset), hold
political executive positions throughout the country, are diplomatic
representatives of the state, can study and teach at all Israeli
universities, and can enter in to all professions. If she used public
transport she would find that passengers, Arabs and Jews, are not
segregated, as they were in South Africa or in her American South,
but travel together freely.

If
there is racism and discrimination in the area it is more pertinent
to the words and actions of Palestinians than those of Israelis. One
example may suffice. In a speech on July 11, 2010, Mahmoud Abbas,
head of the Palestinian Authority, denied Israel’s link to
Jerusalem. Judaization, he said, was stealing Jerusalem’s
“cultural, human, and Islamic-Christian religious history…This
land is Allah’s best land, for which He chooses the finest of His
believers, as it is written in the words of the Prophet.”

How does Alice Walker’s accusation of apartheid apply
to the reality of the recent Israeli case where a supreme court of
two women and an Arab convicted a former president of the state of
sexual offenses? Alice Walker appears to be so entrenched in
her anti-Israeli views that she is apparently preparing to take part
in another flotilla to Gaza. On the way there she may witness the
10.000 rockets in Gaza, some of which are deployed daily against
Israeli civilians, the 50.000 missiles in the hands of Hezbollah in
Lebanon, the absence of Israeli settlers in Gaza and in Sinai, the
attacks on the pipeline in Sinai that exports gas to Jordan and
Israel, and the fence that Israel is building to prevent the entrance
of drugs and illegal immigrants.

Finally, Alice Walker may
see some of the 120,000 black Africans from Ethiopia who are now
citizens of the state of Israel. Whatever this remarkable
assimiilation means it is not “apartheid.”